New forum!

General GTG General Discussion
#1

Hello, is this thing on? I think I made my “first” post!

First thing first, I want to be helpful, because it took me a little trial and error to get my account working again! Here’s how to set your password. I primarily view the forums on a mobile device; your mileage may vary.

  • Tap the “login” button.
  • Enter your email address (or user name, but as Joel’s post explained, some user names had format changes) in the box.
  • Tap the link immediately below your email address that says “skip password, send me an email link.” If successful, you’ll see a message that says there was a matching account found and the system sent you an email.
  • Go to your email, and CHECK YOUR SPAM FOLDERS! Email from the new forum system defaulted to spam in my Gmail.
  • Follow the link; you’ll now be fully logged in to your account. You won’t be prompted for a new password; you have to do that manually.
  • Tap your avatar in the upper right corner
  • Tap the head-and-shoulders icon
  • Tap “preferences”
  • On the preferences screen, use the drop-down menu to go to “account”
  • Scroll down to find a button that says “password” with an email icon. Tap that. The system will send you an email with a link to reset your password.
  • Go check your spam folders again! :wink: Follow the link to reset your password and enter a new password.
  • You’re good to go! Or, at least, that’s as far as I’ve gotten. We’ll see how good we actually are.

I’ve only looked around the new system a little. I definitely appreciate the fact that it has a mobile-friendly format! But I can immediately tell that I’m going to have to learn a LOT about how to navigate in here. I feel less like I’m in a “place” on a sub-forum, and more like I’m immersed in a firehose stream of posts that I have to apply filters to sift through. I’m sure I will get used to figuring out where the activity is, but I don’t know how yet.

Anyway, here we are in the brave new world!

8 Likes
#2

A piece I’ve found helpful for visibility is going to Preferences > Interface and choosing WCAG Dark as the Color Scheme as the white was just too bright.

2 Likes
#3

Well, things certainly are . . . different. I guess we’ll see how this goes.

I am a bit concerned about this new trust level thing. I do see its value in stopping spammers, but I’m afraid that it might motivate some folks to post merely for the sake of posting, and not for contributing to the discussion.

#4

Unlike traditional forum “ranks” that were largely determined by post count, these seem to be more tied to general engagement. Like, getting to rank 2 only involves posting in 3 threads and getting/giving 1 like as limits beyond that are just “exist on the forums” for enough time.

Hmm… I guess there can be incentive to post a lot to maintain level 3, but I think the culture of giving Likes on the forum needs to ramp up for that to even really be a worry in general. That, rather than the “reply in at least 10 topics” feels like it is the real hurdle.

2 Likes
#5

I’m still struggling with identifying new content from the main page. There’s a tiny “1 new” in each relevant category, but I have to select the category, or carefully read the timestamps under “Latest,” to see exactly what’s new.

1 Like
#6

Yeah, agreed, @MindWanderer.

A related thing I am worried about is getting a bunch of notifications for stuff I’m not following. (The example for me is the Sentinel Comics RPG category, but as GTG’s catalog expands, we might have Spirit Island fans who don’t care about Sentinels, or vice versa, and so on.) On the old system, I just didn’t go to the RPG forum. Here, I worry that there are so many RPG posts they will down out the stuff I am interested in in the “new” feed.

I thought I’d try out muting the RPG category and see how that works. If you go to your account preferences, there is a “categories” page accessible via the drop-down menu. Towards the bottom of that page there’s an option to “mute” categories, which says, “You will not be notified of anything about new topics in these categories, and they will not appear on the categories or latest pages.” So I tried putting in the “Sentinel Comics RPG” category.

Now, after I saved, I do still see the RPG listed on the “categories” page. Maybe my setting change will just take time to propagate… I’ll come back later to check.

2 Likes
#7

Thanks for pointing this out. I had missed it and had exactly this kind of filter I had wondered about, so we’ll see how it goes.

#8

I totally missed that the new forums were live! :open_mouth: That’s probably why I had no new posts yesterday! XD

I have to say, visually, they somehow manage to be both too cluttered and too minimalist. Kind of a weird, busy mess. But after looking through just a few threads and seeing what the new functionality can do, my word! This site is doing everything I have always wanted a forum to be able to do for as long as I’ve been online! Only took twenty darn years. :expressionless:

3 Likes
#9

Oh hey this is neat: If you start replying to a thread but than change your mind and close the forums. If you come back the next day and revisit the same thread your unfinished post will still be waiting for you.

1 Like
#10

Oh no, it’s too strong! XD

#11

Update: it took a couple hours, but my “mute” seems to have worked! When I view all “latest” or “new” or “all categories,” I only see stuff from the un-muted forums.

I have also discovered something from creating this topic: I get an email every time one of you replies. I can turn that off, but apparently the default is lots of email notifications.

1 Like
#12

However, you can’t mute a supercategory, you have to mute each individual category. Like, if you mute “Old Rules & Gameplay Boards,” all that gets muted is messages posted into the parent; the category itself and everything underneath it stays.

#13

Thanks for the detailed instructions Trajector, they worked great for me!

1 Like
#14

I’m really not a fan of this forum software. If there was some problem with the old forum where it needed to go away, then I guess this forum is better than no forum, but I really wish they’d gone with something more intuitive and pleasant-looking.